Muscle memory

In a practical sense, the essence of good fly casting is the ability to consistently and accurately land your fly on the precise spot you intend it to go, not once, not twice, but five out of five times in succession. If you think that’s easy, just try it some time using a variety of distances.

Our club target casting results repeatedly reveal that many casters struggle with accuracy and some of them consistently miss many more times than they hit the intended target. This presents a handicap in a fishing sense such as casting to a sighted fish, or simply trying to land your fly in a spot that your eyes tell you is the perfect lie.

Jim Screen won first place at Lakeside’s President’s challenge

This is where our club target casting can help, it’s the ideal tool we can use to highlight faulty technique, and instigate remedial action. It can teach you to land your fly on the precise spot where your eyes are focused. Over the years I’ve noticed a pattern with many casters, as soon as they can manage to get their fly out there on to the water and subsequently succeed in catching a few fish, that’s good enough, any casting glitches become an accepted part of fly fishing.

This situation reminds me of an old saying, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. Repeatedly we can extol the benefits of our club casting facilities, but casters have to want to improve their casting technique, it’s always up to them whether they are prepared to make the concerted effort required to modify their technique. The facilities are there for our members and skilled help is available, it’s just a matter of asking.

Neil Nelson inspecting the hoops

Rest assured, improved casting can only come from improved technique. Modifying old grooved in technique involves getting rid of old muscle memory and creating new muscle memory. There is no quick fix, and without regular monitoring we quickly revert back to old habits. One-off sessions don’t work, it has to be an on- going work in progress. Regular practice is essential, but it has to be the right kind of practice otherwise it’s counter productive.

This is where our regular casting days provide the ideal forum to allow us to monitor a caster’s progress. Our target scoring method provides us with a very simple yet effective method of measuring improvement and has the effect of inspiring confidence as casting scores increase, it’s the confirmation we need to hear. All casters scores can plateau from time to time and the only way to break this cycle is to fine tune technique.